Mistakes in fashion, Lena Dunham obsession continues.

As their charachters

And themselves

By KAREN SCHWARTZ

Published: January 2, 2013

MAYBE it was the episode when Hannah, the main character on the HBO series “Girls,” wore a cardigan festooned with tomatoes to her first paid job, at a law office. Or the one in which Marnie, her uptight best friend, wore a bright little cocktail dress to a Bushwick loft party. Or the one where Jessa wore a long see-through eyelet dress over hot pink underwear to her gig as a nanny.

It’s hard to pin down the exact moment, but at some point while watching the show last spring, I had an unexpected flashback to an ensemble I wore when I was just out of college: a black romper with knickers paired with a white oxford shirt, a red necktie and tights with Lichtenstein-esque cartoons on them. I referred to this get-up as my “signature outfit” and wore it primarily on job interviews.

Such is the difference between “Girls,” whose second season begins on Jan. 13, and its most obvious predecessor, “Sex and the City.” You watched Sarah Jessica Parker et al and thought, I wish I had those shoes. You watch Lena Dunham and crew and think, There, with the grace of God, I wenteth.

The fashions on “Girls” may not be aspirational, but they are very much intentional. “We are very conscious about what the girls are wearing,” said Ms. Dunham, the show’s 26-year-old creator/writer/director, who plays Hannah. “We spend a lot of time talking about that outfit you can’t believe you wore but you know you spent three days dreaming up.”

The show’s costume designer, Jennifer Rogien, agreed. “The overall theme of the show is all the mistakes we go through when we’re trying to find our footing,” she said. “We wanted to embrace all those factors — the youth, the first job, the insecurity in relationships, both romantic and friendship — and see if we could reflect that through the clothing.”

Where “Sex and the City” created a high-end designer-driven fantasy, “Girls” strives above all else for authenticity. “We were really concerned about realism, verisimilitude,” Ms. Dunham said, adding that Jenni Konner, an executive producer, “is always there at my costume fittings to say, ‘That fits a little too well.’ ”

“She’s always calling out the potential for any TV-matchy-cutesy-ness,” Ms. Dunham said.

Key to this ethos, Ms. Konner said, is “never having things that are beyond what these girls can afford.” The show’s most polished looks come from designers like Theory and Tibi, and the decidedly un-Carrie Bradshaw Ann Taylor. Characters also wear some clothes repeatedly.

“Hannah had a pair of very well-loved Rachel Antonoff for Bass loafers that she wore a lot in Season 1,” Ms. Rogien said.

(Side fact: Those shoes were designed by the sister of Jack Antonoff, who is a member of the Grammy-nominated band Fun., and also Ms. Dunham’s boyfriend.)

“It always makes me so crazy when people on shows have a new winter coat every day,” Ms. Dunham said. “I wore the same winter coat for three years after college, even after my dog peed on it.”

Like the experiences portrayed on the show, wardrobes are often imbued with autobiographical specificity. “I once got in a fight with one of my best friends while she was wearing a plastic dress,” Ms. Dunham said. “And the plastic dress became an example of our conflict — like, ‘You’re changing, you’re wearing a plastic dress.’ The plastic dress found a home in Season 2.”

The show often draws the viewer’s attention to its characters’ sartorial crimes. When Hannah reports to her first day of work at a coffee shop in a white dress, her boss tells her to go home and change, saying, “This isn’t a consumptive women’s hospital.” Seeing Marnie in a low-cut floral dress, a character greets her with, “Hello, J.Lo at the Grammys.” In a memorable moment early in Season 2, Marnie, played by Allison Williams, calls Hannah out on her hilariously awful neon mesh top by saying, “What are you wearing?”

“Girls” may be antiglamour, but, in keeping with the show’s larger search-for-identity theme, it is very much about personal style.

The wardrobes, said Ms. Rogien, who previously worked on “The Good Wife” and “Bored to Death,” “are extremely character-driven.”

For these characters, outfits are an important form of self-expression, Ms. Dunham said. “The clothes are really meant to reflect the fantasy the girls have about themselves and are sort of unsuccessfully fulfilling,” she said.

Each girl has her own distinct style. Hannah, Ms. Rogien said, is “lovingly disheveled.”

Much of Hannah’s mix-and-match outfits comes from vintage and thrift stores and sometimes yield looks that don’t look that flattering on the character. “But she’s fully committed to them,” Ms. Rogien explained. In fact, she said, “sometimes we tailor the clothes to fit her even worse.”

Marnie, Hannah’s uptight best friend, suffers from the opposite problem. “She’s very put together,” Ms. Rogien said. Marnie favors structured sheath dresses and wears pieces from Black Halo and DVF. “She’s trying really hard to be professional, to be grown-up, and sometimes she overshoots.” As in Season 1, when she dons a Tibi dress and pumps for a party in Bushwick. “She’s wearing essentially a bat mitzvah dress to a grungy loft party,” Ms. Rogien said.

Shoshanna, the quirkily nervous New York University student played by Zosia Mamet, is the most concerned with outfit propriety. “She’s someone whose reading every book, every magazine and kind of using every fashion rule together at once,” Ms. Konner said.

And she shops, as Ms. Rogien explained. “She’s got both time and potentially a little money to do a little bit of shopping, she said. “We shop her in Bloomingdale’s and Saks.”

Shoshanna is also a big fan of loungewear. She has been known to sport a Juicy Couture sweatsuit, and memorably watched TV in a purple peace-sign snuggy. (“I love that snuggy,” Ms. Rogien said.)

Ms. Mamet said: “It’s about the proper attire for every moment. Even her pajamas match.”

And the bohemian Jessa, played by Jemima Kirke, is, Ms. Dunham said, “a girl with an innately cool sense of style whose confidence can veer into the crazily inappropriate.” Not only did Jessa wear the aforementioned sheer dress to baby-sit (“it’s floor-length,” she said, by way of justification), but she also wore a bathrobe, Ugg boots and geisha-esque hair and makeup to meet up with an ex-boyfriend for a stroll in the park.

The character’s style is, in fact, quite similar to Ms. Kirke’s in real life. “I went to high school with Jemima,” Ms. Dunham said, “and dressing like Jemima was the top pursuit of every girl.”

Many of Jessa’s clothes have, in fact, been based on Ms. Kirke’s real-life outfits, and, in the case of some pieces, like her quickie wedding dress, culled from Geminola, the West Village store owned by her mother, the designer Lorraine Kirke. The elder Ms. Kirke’s repurposed vintage designs were featured on “Sex and the City,” and Ms. Dunham herself worked at Geminola during college.

The store, a small space on a quaint street with ripped wallpaper and tasseled chandeliers where the majority of prices fall in the $295-to-$695 range, seems like a place Jessa could grow up to own. “It’s a little bit Moulin Rouge brothel,” Ms. Dunham said, “but also sort of a sophisticated French salon. Jemima’s house is kind of that way, too.”

Ms. Dunham recalled that, when she worked there, “It would be like no one would come in all day, and then like some really fancy model would come in and buy 15 chandeliers and 9 dresses.”

In a recent phone interview, Ms. Kirke, the designer/proprietor, said that she didn’t recall Ms. Dunham’s time in her store. “But Jemima” — who could be heard in the background — “says I was horrible to her,” she added. “Basically, I started the store to give my daughters’ friends weekend jobs.”

Ms. Dunham’s own long connection to fashion raises an obvious question. Not only did Ms. Dunham, a child of two artists and a graduate of Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s School, work at Geminola, but she also was recently shot by Annie Leibovitz in the outfit that her baby sitter, the designer Zac Posen, made her for her high-school graduation.

Surely, Ms. Dunham’s personal style must diverge from Hannah’s? After all, she did wear Prada to the Emmys.

“Hannah dresses similarly to the way I dressed in late college or when I just graduated,” Ms. Dunham said. “I was less concerned with things looking good on me and more concerned with things being funny or interesting or quirky. I was a really big proponent of the sacklike bubble dress, unfortunately.”

Ms. Konner described Ms. Dunham’s look. “Lena dresses not only much older than Hannah, but much older than her age,” she said. “She’s very ladylike. I rarely see her wearing jeans, and when she does it’s with some kind of stylish blazer.”

Ms. Dunham said: “I always like to think of myself as dressing like a fancy lady at Radcliffe. That’s my fantasy about what’s going on.”

In this respect, Ms. Dunham, who has drawn much attention for her willingness to expose her decidedly non-Hollywood body, is equally notable for her choices when clothed.

When given creative control, few actresses have decided to create characters who look worse on television than they themselves do in life. Lucille Ball had no problem stuffing chocolates in her mouth off an assembly line or crushing grapes with her feet, but she did so in perfect hair and makeup. Tina Fey’s Liz Lemon makes self-deprecating jokes about her still-quite attractive appearance. Even Roseanne Barr, the foremother of female-driven sitcom realism, grew prettier, slimmer and more made-up as her show continued its run.

“The first time I met Lena,” Ms. Konner recalled, “was after seeing ‘Tiny Furniture,’ ” Ms. Dunham’s debut feature film. “I remember being like, Oh, my God, you’re so pretty! She plays herself down so much, which was surprising because it’s so unusual.”

Ms. Dunham said she knew “it wouldn’t be everyone’s choice.” But, she added: “I’m never tortured by seeing bad photographs of myself either. It’s not an ‘I need to do this for the sisterhood’ thing. It’s just a sense of trying to stay true to the characters and what we’re writing about.”

A version of this article appeared in print on January 3, 2013, on page E1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Clothes Make The ‘Girls’.